by Jessica Nin

Don’t throw rocks if you live in a glass house, or Panasonic’s cameras will catch it all. ABC’s newest reality series, The Glass House airs Mondays at 10pm (ET), where its contestants’ daily life and competitive gambits are documented every second of the day. Panasonic’s HD pan-tilt-zooms cameras are strategically placed throughout The Glass House capturing its inhabitants every move in this unscripted show where the viewers are in charge. 

The series features 14 contestants living and competing for $250,000 in a wired, state-of-the-art house. Via online and social networks, viewers are expected to follow the contestants they like and those they don’t. Viewer votes help determine which contestants are sent home and which eliminated players will get a second chance to return to The Glass House to compete week after week.

The primary reason the HE120s were chosen for The Glass House was the cameras’ networking capability, with ultra-high picture quality a close second, and specifically for its flexible format that also shoots 720p. The AW-HE120, delivering the highest image quality of any integrated PTZ camera, features a fast 20X zoom lens and a three 2.2 megapixel U.L.T. MOS imagers supporting Full HD video capture. Bexel Broadcast Services is supplying 21 AW-HE120s for the reality series, and also supplied four Panasonic AW-RP50 remote camera controllers in addition to the HE120s. 

“I staged a competitive evaluation with two other manufacturers’ PTZs, and the Panasonic cameras excelled in terms of image production and overall performance.” said Jerry Kaman, Broadcast Engineering Consultant, “Specifically, the HE120 is format flexible and also shoots 720p, most of its competitors don’t, and The Glass House is a 720p show. Also, the HE120 is fast, one and a half stops faster than the competition, which means we were able to lower the overall light level of the production.”

Kaman said the production is shooting 720P/59.94, and encoding to OP-1a MXF files. Cinedecks are handling the encoding, and files are written directly to SAN and Avid ISIS.

For more information about The Glass House, visit http://beta.abc.go.com/shows/the-glass-house

About the Panasonic AW-HE120

Ideally suited for such demanding applications as TV production, sports, staging, House of Worship as well as news and government video, the HE120 is equipped with the same high-performance sensors and digital signal processing used in Panasonic broadcast camcorders such as the AG-HPX370. With 1000 TV lines of resolution and a 60dB signal-to-noise ratio, the HE120 sets a new performance standard for integrated PTZ cameras. Advanced features include 16-axis color correction and Panasonic’s exclusive DRS (Dynamic Range Stretch). HD-SD/SDI, HDMI, Analog Component, and SD Composite outputs are all built-in, for out-of-the-box ease of deployment. The camera’s 20X optical zoom lens covers an extended range of shooting situations, from small room wide-angle to back of the house ultra-telephoto, with 35mm equivalents of 32.1 mm at wide-angle to 642.5 mm at telephoto. The HE120 supports both RS-422 serial control and IP control with dedicated RJ-45 connectors. For more information, visit www.panasonic.com/broadcast.

Content courtesy of: Cohn&Wolfe

Photos are courtesy of: ABC Television Network